linux version unexpected behaviour - what do I need to change?

[fred.d]

So, recently was on holiday and as I am mid change to linux across the 
board I took a mint laptop with me.

Downloaded a few things that we wanted to watch and listen to while away 
using get_iplayer but a couple of things occurred.

1) Downloaded file names contained a lot of spurious underscores and 
hyphens (not plain whitespace) and had the PID embedded at the end of 
the filename.
  It's years since I set up gip on Windows at home so I've forgotten 
most of what I learned but I suspect that I don't see these on the 
desktop because I have a fileprefix command in the home options file. Is 
the standard o/p to embed the pid and split with underscore?

2) I can't for the life of me get the outputtv and outputradio strings 
correct in the linux options file. My limited knowledge of shell 
substitution I suspect.

I want files to go in "[HOME]   /Downloads/ip/tv" and a radio directory 
of the same parentage.

I tried lines with
             outputtv ~/Downloads/ip/tv

which created a subdirectory called "~" with the relevant subdirs

I moved on to
             outputtv $HOME/Downloads/ip/tv

which created a subdirectory called "$HOME" with the relevant subdirs

what am I missing here to pass a relative directory name for home into 
get_iplayer from the options file?

Thanks